The wonder of mortality

http://phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/2013/05/17/mediocre-poison-eaters-and-the-imperfection-of-evolution/

This is what I wrote on Google Plus about the article inked to above:

"The author maintains in a fascinating article that evolution is successful if the results are good enough, not perfect. The nice argument may well be the case, but the example, an oak tree which has not evolved an immunity to a specific disease, ignores the wondrous fact that in death there is more creation (the animals that live on decayed oak trees) and in fact, faster new creation sometimes. "

I hesitated to point out more, considering the forum, but in fact the situation the article discusses, is a great example of people ignoring the obvious. First -- the oaks-- if they lived forever, they would push everything else off the planet. Death, an aspect of the destructive flow, in fact is crucial to life, to the greater good, and minimally, what Jan Cox called "D" flow, can be said to stabilize the machinery -- steady the Magnus Machina, as he titled one book. 

The binary intellect must consider that things are isolated. In fact "cause and effect,"  takes a new meaning if you try to see beyond the rational, this or that. You could say that the way things interact laterally is as important to understand, as pulling out one thread, and understanding one sequence. The fact is everything interacts with everything, and specifying a single strand as embodying cause and effect, as necessary as this artificiality is, becomes misleading, if the abstraction is taken as more than a temporary tool. 

Widening your vision beyond either/or not only reduces silly statements like oak trees are an imperfect evolution, it allows perhaps a thought about the way things fit together, and what that could mean. To expand your scope to include more "both / and" situations, allows more insight into reality, 

You might even glimpse the way people think. 

From the news, an olds subject

A scrap from the newspapers, on the web of course---

"Last year, the Queen made a cameo on television as part of the London 2012 Olympic opening ceremony, appearing as herself as part of a James Bond sketch before a stunt-double jumped out of a helicopter."

What this bit made me think was how we are all, mostly, (unless we are involved in physical labor, or practising the how, of self-observation, (a la Gurdjieff and Jan Cox)) in a movie script, appearing as ourselves, and using a stunt double, over and over and....

Using a stunt double, is that not a nice picture of how at the ordinary level of attention, we both have a dream scene in our heads and also -- are the audience for ourselves -- for some part of a story?

The limitations of words

Contemplate the limitations of words if you can. This is a quote from the Daily Beast today, May 12, 2013.

quote

Nancy Ruiz, the mother of kidnapping victim Gina DeJesus, called her reunion with her daughter "the best Mother's Day gift I could ever have" 

end quote.

and for the mothers

If we can glimpse that words are just the foam on the tide, then the following might make sense:

The Ten Commandments--- in an era when man was sparse, speaking speciesously ----- and his linguistic talents fresh --- it made sense to carve rules in stone and expect their --- gravity to be adored---, pondered and used as rules for living.

The specifics, are still guidelines. My point is not that we stop honoring our mother and father, or any other shalts, ballots,or shalt nots.

But that, keeping in mind the fallacious either/or nature of language---

we glimpse some new guidelines that are only superficially contradictory. 

Perhaps evil was once unambiguous,for good reasons, and say, abortion for instance, might even threaten the whole of mankind, if it became fashionable. 

But I wonder if the focus of what is evil, now, might not be shifting. And now, the unambiguous evil, might be more what threatens the whole planet. Like some pesticides. 

If I am correct, such unambiguity -- is there a better word --- will always be in a shifting state, but a shift which is imperceptible within one lifetime. And so there will come a time when planet threatening issues will change again. 

Jan Cox would have pointed out that Life is not going to let anything too drastic happen anyway. Probably. 

What if

"Memorial" is always

the same thing as -- marmoreal --

One implication of this, if it is the case, is that to remember is the same as to forget.

Useful for the mechanical purposes of the larger machinery.

And what must be seen through, at an extraordinary level. 

Headlines of Yesterday

This sounds like one of the saddest situations to come out of the whole too small to succeed, indeed too small to even get your name in a story which ends with 'the gunman dead.' This guy did not take some child hostage, he took 5 young -- tough -- trained -- firemen, hostage. 

http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/04/11/us-usa-georgia-hostage-idUSBRE93916X20130411?feedType=RSS&feedName=domesticNews

Nor did the negotiations with a swat team last long, but I don't know, maybe they had to move in.  The thing is -- he wanted his electric power turned back on, in his home which was being foreclosed on. We are wired to everything in this world. And I can imagine the panic, the aggravation, the rage, the sense of undeserved injury, that man felt. And our being able to put ourselves in his place is an aspect of how we are all wired into the larger world.

But  what is the logic of hostage taking? This sense of being in a corner and trapped, okay. But adding a mind to a physical animal, how do you get to the point where it makes any sense to hold another person prisoner to exchange for your demands being met? Why would you think they would carry through on any promises some negotiator made? Apart from anything else, promises made under duress are not binding. And then there is the statistically significant outcome wherein you are gunned down like a dog.

All this points to the fact  hostage taking shows a great faith in the logic of the mind. A faith in words, a belief in the things you learned in school. That is one conclusion to draw from the actions of hostage takers: I have this, if you want it, you must give me such and such. That this is fantastically out of touch merely means that the logic of the hostage taker is ordinary. 

No doubt many will say he was irrational. Well sure, but what does that really explain? There is something else to be gleaned. It may be that we see a subterranean logic at work here, a hormonal wisdom, which is just, out of step with the times. Because for millenia fleeing was a sensible, and often used, tactic. Jan Cox, mystico-philosopher of the last century, pointed out that for the first time in history, there is now, no place to flee to.  When there were woods to hide you, and far valleys where the only sure thing was, that your enemies could not find you, there was a horizon of some kind of freedom for the sturdy. The logic of the man pushed to desperate measures may rely on this ancient knowledge,a forlorn but not irrational, knowledge. 

Illustrating a pedagogic technique which is rarely used, for good reasons

As I  walked by an evergreen bush a cardinal bolted up away from his hidden spot. Perhaps by the end of this post the relevance of this event to the topic will be clearer to me.

Everybody has mystical experiences. Mostly they do not recognize what happened. But this kind of event is a major component of the known and unknown energies defining the planet and beyond. This came to mind after I remembered the fact some Christian sects are based on the fact they do NOT observe certain holidays. And you can see their point -- how could getting presents for Christmas, spending money, be commemorating the life of an unwitting founder of a faith which is so widespread? You see their point and you imagine, probably accurately, that some founder of some similar sect had a bolt of awareness on this subject, and taking that experience, felt authenticated to found a whole faith on this 'revelation.' What I am calling a mystical experience. 

Yet, that recent founder did not have a big enough picture. This splinter realization is not the engorging reality it seems at the time. He is defining a faith on a moment which was not as encompassing as it could have been. The confusion in the wake of this authenticating type of experience is typical of human knowledge. That it works, and that it is right, does not mean it is the ONLY thing that defines reality and yet so wonderful is the experience that people charge ahead without keeping in mind the proportion of known and unknown. For most the experience means they know the important things. The unknown is irrelevant. This is an ordinary assumption.

The topic in this post  is not religion. Religion was just an example of the way the mind works. Those studying and writing about the natural sciences do the same thing. Take the pork chop for a pig. Those 'flashes of insight' scientists report are just low level mystical experiences. Typically the popularizers of science think they can measure what science has remaining to discover. This belief  hints at the ordinariness of the rational mind. For a brief consideration suggests that only from a perspective of the whole can you accurately define the parts. And this whole is beyond the grasp of modern science. I will be kind and say, it is beyond them at the moment. 

 That you have to focus, and by doing so, leave out relevant details is part of the binary mind. This narrow focus is a necessary part of human progress and intelligent community. Yet to take a detail,and assume it gets the whole picture, can be very misleading, misleading to those seeking to figure it all out. Fortunately for all, such folks, bound to figure it all out, are few. 

About that cardinal, a flush of red on a flash of green: no I don't know its relevance to this topic I could come up with a cheap metaphor, but I won't.